Kameron’s link — I got nothing to add except, high-five to her for talking about this stuff.

The Author’s Guild survey — nnnyeah, I’m not really willing to count that as meaningful information. The data in that survey, according to Publisher’s Weekly, skews this way:

The survey, conducted this spring by the Codex Group, is based on responses from 1,674 Guild members, 1,406 of whom identified either as a full-time author, or a part-time one. The majority of respondents also lean older—89% are over the age of 50—and toward the traditionally published end (64%).

Note that I am not a guild member. I’m not sure I know many (any?) guild members.

It’s a very narrow slice of the author cake, and made even narrower when you consider how many of them are strictly traditionally-published, and how many are over 50 years of age. (I’m not suggesting any age-ist critique, but rather, I’m noting that the more you dwindle survey participants, the shallower the pool becomes of meaning.)

That said, regardless of the depth (or lack of depth) the author’s guild survey possesses, I think once in a while it’s a good idea to wad up all the financial realities that surround a writer’s existence, cram them into a cannon, and then fire them top speed into your solar plexus.

I am a full-time writer.

I do pretty okay for myself. I support my family with my words, which is pretty cool — and, no doubt, pretty rare. I am aware and have been privy to the many peaks and valleys of a writer’s career, and the key to surviving as a writer is learning how to survive the valleys — either figuring out how to glide from peak to peak, or having a plan to weather the lean times when things go down. Surviving the peaks is easy — everyone enjoys good news. But some authors can’t navigate the stark elevation drop and, understandably, move on to more stable ground.

Let’s talk about the financial realities that you’ll deal with — both peaks and valleys.

On advances, sure, there still exists those advances that are $100,000, or are up over a million. But if you’re a new author, you’ll probably find yourself in the $5k – $15k range. And if you’re a practiced, published author, you might drift higher, which is from $15k-35k.

You’ll note that none of those numbers individually make for good full-time money.

You can do okay on $35k, but depending on where you live, it might strain the budget.

(And here, a digression: where you live actually matters to the writer. It doesn’t matter in terms of BEING CLOSE TO THE ACTION — your proximity to NY Publishing is not as important to an author as proximity to LA MovieLand is to a screenwriter. No, it matters because some parts of the money cost less than others. If you are one of those writers who wants very badly to live in New York City or its surrounding environs, be prepared to discover that your book advance will pay for 14 minutes of rent, and you’ll be able to maybe afford an apartment that is roughly the size of a dented Porta-potty. In fact, spoiler warning: it is a dented Porta-potty. This is also true if you want to live in most of the big cities. Everything in the cities is more expensive. I live in Pennsyltucky, where things are more expensive than, say, Down South or the Middle Of American Cornsville, but remain a helluva lot less expensive than NYC. So, if you want your advance money to stretch like Spandex — don’t live in the city. Also don’t forget to budget for health care.)

Now, one of the ways that this is softened somewhat is that an author often ends up signed for a multi-book deal — usually two or three, or if you’re the mighty John Scalzi, a 43-book deal to the tune of a basket of golden dodo eggs. (That monster doesn’t even hoard his eggs like a proper person would. He just eats them. Greedily eats the baby golden dodos right out of their little luxe eggs. The crunch of tiny porcelain bones echoing across his moon veranda.) So, a $5k book deal becomes $10k or $15k. A $33k book deal, when tripled, becomes a low six-figure deal. And when that happens, that’s you cresting a peak — but it’s also good to keep your eyes peeled ahead for when that money dries up and leaves you again in a valley. (Valleys are when you try to write the books you owe and also try to stir up new book deals.)

Ostensibly, this is a good thing.

Except —

Consider the nature of the multi-book deal. Often they want to turn this into a series deal — three books might mean a trilogy, or two books might mean the start of a series (or more problematically, two-thirds of a trilogy, which means if those two books don’t sell, the trilogy will never complete). This is a tough row to hoe because traditional wisdom says that book sales for an SFF series don’t tend to go up — so, if you sell 1500 copies of that first book, it’s not expected that book two will sell more than that and is likely to, in fact, sell fewer copies. I distrust the logic behind this, as some readers want to buy into a series after it has a few books out — or they want a trilogy only when it’s completed because they’ve been burned too many times by trilogies that failed to complete — and ironically, it’s this exact logic that sometimes causes trilogies to die in the crib. B&N will see that the first book didn’t sell that well, and they will cut order for the second book — which helps ensure that second book will sell more poorly, at least in physical format. (B&N has a surprising amount of sway when it comes to traditional publishing. They can demand new covers, new titles, and so on. As the last big player in books, they have juice and they use it. Of course, they also lose more and more of their retail floor space to Things That Are Not Books.)

Of course, that’s all physical stock. E-books are a different world, and Amazon rules that world.

Mostly. Sorta.

We now have news that says e-book sales are plateauing or even slipping in the face of print sales — the logic being, people are going back to print sales and that print is more future-proof against the digital insurgency. (Anecdotally, I have gone back to mostly print reading except when I’m traveling. Electronic devices are sources of distraction, and even when they’re walled off from those distractions, they still tickle that twitchy internet-social-media-gamer gland in me and I find it harder to lose myself in the book). Of course, what you also need to note is that publishers set the e-book prices, and have in the last several months bumped those prices up, up, up — and Amazon undercuts those prices by dropping the physical copy cost.

So, what about e-books? All of this has been very firmly traditional-flavored — what about the author-publishers putting their own work out there? I’ve discussed this in the past, but obviously with self-publishing you lose access to any kind of advance and you cut off access to certain outlets and resources, but you also gain immediate access to data plus them sweet, sweet percentage cuts of each sale. (Though the larger cut of sales should feed back a little into the ecosystem as you pay for things like covers and editors and majordomos and jet-skis.)

Self-publishing has serious value for any author, but Amazon now dominates that ecosystem. Amazon sets the rules and can change them with the fickle whimsy of a maniac artificial intelligence. NOW YOUR PERCENTAGES ARE CUT IN HALF AND ALSO FOR EVERY BOOK SOLD YOU WILL RECEIVE AN ELECTRICAL SHOCK, Amazon yells through your computer speaker. And you say, quite correctly, But I can leave you any time, Amazon. And Amazon tells you to go ahead, sure, you go right ahead and leave. And then you leave and you discover that because so many people invested their time and effort into the Amazon ecosystem that really, the other sales environments are nowhere near as robust and so while you technically have other options, that’s like saying to a food vendor, “You don’t have to sell in the grocery store, you could just set up a farmstand on the side of the road.” A viable option for some, and some will truly rock the freedom of that. Others will find the lack of access to a wider audience a struggle. Plus, Amazon institutes new programs with the distractibility of a toddler on bath salts. KINDLE UNLIMITED. KINDLE SCOUT. KINDLE WORLDS. KINDLEFACE. KINDLE UNIVERSE. KINDLE DEEP DREAM. KINDLEPALOOZA. SOYLENT KINDLE. Those present new opportunities — opportunities to make more money and sell more books sometimes. And sometimes, opportunities to have the algorithms shift like tectonic plates, losing you sales and cutting your income.

The majority of your sales will come from Amazon and, if you promote it, from direct sales. B&N, Kobo, Smashwords — those sales will be, by most experiences (though not all!) marginal.

Let’s talk a little about sales numbers.

A book that sells a few thousand copies is probably a book that’s doing well.

A book that sells a few thousand copies in its first week is really spiffy.

Some books sell a few hundred copies. Which is, erm, not ideal.

If you want on a bestseller list, expect that you’ll need to sell (roughly) 5,000 copies. Each bestseller list is curated differently and fails to factor sales from certain sources (libraries, f’rex).

For the record, that means that in a country with a population of 320 million, a bestselling novel might reach less than 0.002% of the total population. Books are a niche market.

Selling a few thousand copies also might mean earning out your advance — note that the higher the advance, the harder it is to earn it out. There is no guaranteed metric on earning out. Depends on format, book cost, where they sold, who the publisher is, if a butterfly flapped its wings in Tokyo, and if you put out the proper sacrifices to all the local and national gods. Note too that booksellers can also return unsold books which can ding your sales numbers and, for all I know, impact your spiritual karmic debt and force you to be reborn in your next life as an unpaid Huffington Post blogger. *sad trombone*

Some publishers share sales data quickly. Some won’t share it until your statements are due, and publisher statements arrive with all the speed of a three-legged, antediluvian mule. You have access to BookScan through Amazon, but BookScan is notoriously unreliable (expect it to reveal about 50-80% of actual print sales, and no digital sales — also it puzzles me to this day that Amazon refuses to offer authors the added value of telling them their daily sales numbers of traditionally-published releases, though that might undercut the value of their passive-aggressive impossible-to-discern “sales ranking” numbers, which have about as much meaning as the backwards-talking dwarf from Twin Peaks). A lot of time you operate under the auspices of grave, anxious uncertainty when it comes to the question of exactly how well your book is doing.

And how well your book does goes into the equation a publisher runs when considering whether or not to publish your next book. Again, go back to read Kameron’s post, where she lays this equation out as Books Sold + Marketability + Love. This equation also factors into bookstores choosing to carry — and hand-sell — your book. They’ll carry books that sell well. They’ll push books that will look good on shelves or that the publisher has promoted to sales tables or endcaps. They’ll carry and promote books by authors the booksellers or sales team likes. Amazon is of course outside of this — as they are outside many of the traditional systems (and mostly, thankfully so). Amazon gives little shit about you as an author or your book. They’ll sell it. It’s an always open access channel because they have theoretically infinite shelf space. Sure, this changes when it comes time to promote inside Amazon — getting onto deal pages or into certain sales — then who you are and what your book is might matter. Those are curated by people, not by whatever roving Spider Robots govern the rest of the site.

All of this is to say, it’s all quite tricky.

Peaks and valleys. And the “realities” I’m talking about are variable and unknown — so variable and so unknown that it’s hard to even peg them as confirmed realities. Writers don’t actually have a lot of data. We’re not sure what works, what doesn’t. We’re not given hard facts on why a book does well or why it doesn’t. You hear urban fantasy doesn’t sell, and yet Jim Butcher, Seanan McGuire, Kevin Hearne are all rocking. You hear horror is anathema, but some of the best books and writers out there right now are ostensibly writing horror novels (Paul Tremblay, Stephen King, Joe Hill, Mira Grant). As I am wont to say, publishing is positively oracular. It’s a lot of splayed-open pigeons and futures discerned through loops and piles of bird guts.

To go from peak to peak, you do what you can do.

What you can do is write the best book you can write.

That is, of course, nowhere near enough to save you or survive — bad books can do well, and good books die on the vine all the fucking time. Luck is a factor. You can lean into luck, but you can’t manufacture it. (Put differently: it’s easier to summon lightning than to create it.)

So, you not only write the best book you can write, but — you write as much as you care to write. How do I do this thing that I do? How do I personally survive the financial aspect of the writing life? I do it by writing a whole goddamn lot. That softens the valleys and lengthens the peaks because I keep a steadily rolling series of advances, royalties, and D&A payouts. Plus, I ameliorate all that with self-publishing money — that money comprises maybe 25% of my total annual income, but it comes faster and with monthly regularity. Ah, but here’s the rub —

Some traditional publishers have non-competes, which makes it harder to publish across multiple publishers and, if they’re being really rough on you, harder to publish self-pub work, too.

This can shiv a writer right in the kidneys if you’re not careful. Not that it’s not that understandable that publishers would want this — non-complete clauses that directly highlight specific competitive products (meaning, YOU CAN’T PUBLISH NOVELS IN THIS DIRECTLY COMPETING GENRE versus YOU CAN’T PUBLISH ANYTHING EVER EVER EVER AND DON’T EVEN TRY OR WE WILL MURDER YOUR FACE) are totally understandable. And even the broader competition can be problematic in terms of booksellers. Unlike Amazon, they don’t have infinite shelf-space and if two of your books are coming out close to one another, that means the bookseller may make the choice to carry one over the other — which further means that one publisher will lose out over another. Plus, if you’re hoping to hit awards or best-of-lists or gain media for the book season upcoming, having multiple books so close together again forces a choice. Do they talk about Book X or Book Z? Who wins? Who loses?

And yet, it’s very difficult for an author to survive publishing one book a year.

So, again, what do you do?

A savvy, sassy, diverse mix will keep your bills paid. Make a budget. Have a calendar.

Write some for a traditional publisher.

Write and publish some yourself, and time the releases accordingly.

Don’t sign contracts with clauses that box you up and choke you out. Help publishers who help you. Avoid publishers who treat you like anything less than a partner.

Get an agent — a good agent who works for you, not one who treats you like you work for them. Then, when you have this good agent, trust that agent. (But listen to your gut, too.)

Write across a variety of formats — a novella here, a short story there. Write across media if you can manage it — freelance an article here, write a comic there, something, anything. Try a small press. Serialized content. Non-fiction. Keep loose. Get ready to jump to something new. Write only in one genre at your peril. Write only one type of thing to your detriment. Go all-in with any ecosystem and if that ecosystem dies, then what? Multi-class like a motherfucker. NINJA NECRO-WIZARD ACCOUNTANT. SORCEROUS DARK SIDE PALADIN. INQUISITOR FREMEN MONKEY TRAINER. Be a writer like those cool-ass assassins in movies where they unfurl their weapons case and it’s got like, knives and guns and grenades and lightsabers and shit. What you write is like your fighting style. Know many styles for maximum punch-fu. Be versatile. Be awesome. Be as productive as you are able and as career-focused as you can muster.

Don’t be some drunk driver just wildly veering through your career. Aim for stuff. Have goals and accelerate toward them aggressively. Stay sharp. Stay frosty. Be ready for the next thing, but not at the cost of the thing you’re currently doing.

Have a plan for the next year, for two years, for five years, and for ten years.

Course correct when you must.

But stay on target until you’re forced to do differently.

And fuck anybody who tells you that you can’t do this.

You got this. But you gotta have a hard head and a callused heart to survive.

Note that none of this information is going to be perfect — and no advice found here is perfectly applicable across the board. But it’s a good start.

A writing career is tough, financially, but far from impossible.

What else? What am I missing? Got questions?

Either me or other AUTHORIAL or PUBLISHING PROFESSIONALS might have answers.

[EDIT: Fellow penmonkey Django Wexler brought up a good point about subsidiary rights — one of the other ways to shorten the valleys and sharpen the peaks is through subsidiary rights. That means foreign rights, plus variable editions of the books [library, book club editions], audio, film/TV, games, etc. — you can’t really control those, strictly speaking, but what you can do is have you and your agent maximize your rights in that space. Keep as many of those rights for yourself and sell off the rights. The foreign rights for the Miriam Black series have paid considerably more than the domestic rights across two publishers. Add in the film/TV payment, and that number only jumps higher. Some publishers will keep certain rights, and when they sell the book’s rights, the advance is paid against your advance. Leading to theoretically quicker royalties. This isn’t ideal, though — the best and sharpest way to utilize those rights financially is to keep them for yourself and to sell them through your agent or through a sub-agent.]

* * *

ZER0ES.

An Anonymous-style rabble rouser, an Arab spring hactivist, a black-hat hacker, an old-school cipherpunk, and an online troll are each offered a choice: go to prison or help protect the United States, putting their brains and skills to work for the government for one year.

But being a white-hat doesn’t always mean you work for the good guys. The would-be cyberspies discover that behind the scenes lurks a sinister NSA program, an artificial intelligence code-named Typhon, that has origins and an evolution both dangerous and disturbing. And if it’s not brought down, will soon be uncontrollable.

Really great stuff, Chuck. I think it ties in nicely with your previous post on being prolific. That ability comes down to the writer, of course, but being able to write A LOT is a real necessity it seems. And to write different things. Books, comics, freelance journalism/academic writing gigs, self-pub stuff, blog posts–write write write! But it’s a job. Writing is a job. That means you gotta work.

Don’t forget those advances–if you can get them–and your royalties are also quickly eaten into by the IRS. And if you make above a certain amount, you will mightily get whacked with a hefty self-employment penalty by same-said IRS (Infernal Revenue Suckheads), which means you need to hie thyself to one of the legal DIY sites and file for an incorporation and EIN and pay yourself out of the corporation to avoid a hugely chunk of penalties. AND, if you’re in a state that also has a state income tax, you’re doubly dry-humped in that way as well.

(Not a tax man, consult your accounting numerologist, yadda-yadda.)

And if you have an agent, they will cut into that as well. (Again, watch contracts and make sure there are no tricky-dicky clauses stating they’re eligible for a cut of everything you get forever on a particular title, or even across the board regardless of how/where it’s published and if they weren’t even involved in the process.)

YES- to “Again, watch contracts and make sure there are no tricky-dicky clauses…” Most agents are truly good people- but like any profession, there are some who are real con artists. If your not good with the legalese, might be worth it to network with a law major leaning toward contract law. Or just hire an attorney, if you can afford it.

I wouldn’t recommend incorporating and dealign with payroll. Then you have to deal with withholdings, and unless you take true pleasure with navigating accounting programs and sticking to your state and federal deadlines, the cure kills the patient faster than the plague. Furthermore, the TaxMan will want you to pay at least as much in withholdings as you’ve paid before. It gets hard justifying your slumps to them. It’s stressful, humiliating, and your diaphanous corporate veil costs a pretty penny in the end.

Kinda depends. A new name means debut author (artificially) which can mean new attention and new life. Alternately, it also means you don’t have any audience you’ve worked to build. Some genres are more segmented than others, so too age ranges. No firm answer, but pluses and minuses.

I really needed to hear all of this right now (particularly in conjunction with Hurley’s educational post). Thank you for rocking the diversification – you’re a really good example of how that can work without letting go of the Sceptre of Awesome while you’re writing.

I was curious about whether the people who were surveyed for the Author’s Guild might be making most of their income in writing-adjacent fields, like teaching creative writing. Most of my writing teachers in high school and college had some kind of publication under their belts, but they weren’t selling nearly enough to make a living wage off writing alone. They would all have identified themselves as part-time or full-time writers.

I had the same thought, except my question centered more on speaking gigs than teaching. I know, from where I sit in the library world, that we’re always trying to stretch inadequate programming money as far as possible, and while we want to pay a fair fee, a lot of times, what we can afford barely covers expenses. Bigger institutions pay better and make it more worth a speaker’s trouble, of course.

On the other hand, there are probably more than a dozen authors in my extended social circle – not people I know personally to ask, but friends of friends – who say they are “making a living on writing” (and you have to wonder what constitutes “a living”) but I know they are not publishing, or selling, enough to make a living on the books themselves, but are doing a fair bit of public speaking, selling merchandise on their blogs and at events, and so on. So it makes me curious how that side of the business works.

I don’t know if they’ve released the entire survey, so at this point I don’t know how granular it gets — but given how many people are out there writing and to what capacity, I think their information is somewhat limited — not useless, mind you, and there may be some truth to author incomes dropping by 30% (anecdotally, I continue to hear and see how advances are up, not down). Hard to say.

I’ve just started the hunt for an agent as im ready to try to flog what i’ve written. Got to love the timing of this article :). That aside i agree with a comment made by someone here, unless you are at a point where you know you can survive on writing alone, dont jump into it from the job that actually pays you and does keep a roof over your head. Yes i know this is a safe option and yes it limits the amout of writing you get done, but if the market place is that cut-throat and niche then you’ve almost nothing to lose by honing your edge (book) to an insanely fine edge, because even with a sharper book you might not make it anyway. But as always the main thing to realise is that you never know what is going to sink or swim until you throw it into the market place. (Please note i am at work while i write this lol)

Right on the money as usual. A very inspiring blog. Diversification and crossing genres is something I like, and is ultimately controllable if you’re self-published. Fortunately, I don’t rely on my writing income to keep the roof over my head, but I still look to maximise the opportunities. Great post.

Thank you for clarifying more on the Author’s Guild survey and sharing Kameron Hurley’s post. I’m also in the process of querying and trying to figure out what direction to go with this and that. I’m doing my best to keep my writing and publishing separate when I’m working so I’m not like a deer in headlights when I sit down. This article helped to give me a new perspective on what I want to do next. I shared this with others in hopes it does the same for them.

“Soylent Kindle.” I love that. As someone who’s loyal to Barnes and Noble, I much prefer my Nook. I love your posts. So much of what you say is Twitter-worthy. I actually just tweeted this: “What you write is like your fighting style. Know many styles for maximum punch-fu.” So informative and the kind of Reality Face Slap reminder that I needed. I don’t plan to make a living from my writing (I actually want to open a nonprofit writing center for youth), so I’ve decided to just post my work on my site, serial fiction-like. No eventual ebooks or print version, just stories on my site. I don’t want to have to worry about book layouts, agents, editors, book covers, marketing, book reviews and all that shit. I’m just going to write for me and if people read it, then so be it.

Perfect advice!! Loved your speech at Seton Hill this past residency. I’ve been following your blog every since. I’m totally taking your advice. I’ve been self-pubbing for a few years and finally a full-time writer. Everything you’ve said and are saying is something that fuels me to get up another day and put myself out there. Thanks!

[…] I started with this blog post from the esteemed and successful Chuck Wendig: Peaks and Valleys: The Financial Realities of a Writer’s Life. Realize, in no way is this me jumping onto his current cluster event. Rather, it’s me taking […]

Honest and informative. As of now, I’m a student living on a scholarship, and am trying to make some extra bucks by content writing for a website. I’m working on my fiction manuscripts and shopping some completed ones around to publishers. Although I want to work a full time job in the future, I do hope my writing (fiction) will be of quality good enough to help me make some decent income on the side 🙂

And don’t rest on your laurels. Don’t think OH I HAVE A BOOK DEAL HOORAY FOREVER! because shit can go south in a hot minute. Publishers CAN and DO fall out of love with you. Don’t get complacent. Don’t assume that writing something good will be enough.

Thank you for this, Chuck. I will claw my way out of this valley, and this was the kick in the keester I needed.

Great stuff. It’s taken me a while to understand that I can never give up the day job – being a mum. However, by giving up work to do the Mum thing, I do get some time to write, even if it’s only a little bit which I probably wouldn’t have had in the kinds of jobs I did before.

What you say about plans, permanence, etc. I can second that with a story of my own. 😉

A while back it looked like I was going to get some TV script work. I was gazing, dewy-eyed, down the barrel of an insane amount of money compared to the peanuts I earn now, coupled with the chance to learn how to write scripts while producing them for a known and loved puppet character for the BBC, and get a foot in the door of a very lucrative industry, maybe… It got as far as meeting the programme makers before another TV company offered a truck load of money to do it in a documentary format. The scripted adventure series they wanted me to write for the Beeb was shelved. Never count your chickens until you have eaten the omelette and are actually washing up the plate.

What that taught me was that, if I had the kind of day job I could give up, I would probably have to be earning about £100k a year (about $150k at today’s exchange rate) with projected earnings of the same the next year before I felt confident jacking it in – or telling my husband that he can. Mainly because a lot of things like the script work crop up in my life and fizzle out, which would suggest the chicken of good luck and success will not be smacking me around the head with a hugantic golden egg any time soon; or more likely, that I suck at closing the deal. 😉

On average I get a book out every 18 months BUT – stop laughing at the back – I do that in about 150 hours a year with big gaps in between writing times for school holidays. That probably makes me pretty fucking prolific but it maketh not a good living. 😉 Not yet anyway. Maybe in 100 years time when I’ve brought out enough books… or if the script people change their minds… 😉

What I mean is it’s a fact that not all of us will be able to give up the day job, but the whole point of being a writer is that you write because you have to. I’ll hope the dream, I’ll try to achieve it, but since my life is a happy one and since I get any time to write, at all, and I write books, and I’m proud of what I write, I’m probably living the best bit of the dream already.

If you are relying on sporadic income — which is pretty much the description of peaks and valleys — one way to “glide between the peaks” is to learn to save. Basic financial literacy is important. If you’re a writer whose peaks and valleys end up as a $60K annual income? You might think about living like it was $45K. This is actually good advice for anyone, but especially those whose incomes are less than predictable.

Just as I’ve found a cover artist and reckon I’m good to start putting out some serial fiction next year this was quite a sobering experience, especially the Hurley article. All in a good way though, I feel spurred on and like my goal is made a little more clear.
If the average self-published digital-only book sells 250 copies in its’ lifetime, I want to sell at least 251.

“A lot of the confusion stems from this: in nearly all media coverage of the AAP’s declining ebook revenue, their sales — the sales of just 1,200 traditional publishers — are being conflated with the overall sales of the entire US ebook market.”

Sure, the source has its own biases, but I find the reasoning pretty compelling. The reason trad pub eBook sales declined involves their ever-increasing pricing strategy whereas self-pub authors can be more nimble. They can respond to Amazon’s flavor of the day programs to maximize sales while trad pub can’t (or simply doesn’t participate). At the same time, self pubs aren’t pricing themselves out of the digital market by trying to sell eBooks for the same (or more in some cases) than physical copies.

As Russ points out above, Author Earnings released their take on it (linked in his comment).

The problem here, of course, is that there’s no source you can *entirely* trust to not be pushing a particular agenda, or at the very least not suffering from bias. In the case of the Author’s Guild, they skew pretty heavily towards old-school big-publishing dinosaurs. That’s largely their membership, and the guys calling the shots at the top are the best-selling dinosaurs most heavily invested in the old ways. The ridiculousness of their full-page NYT ads during the Amazon-Hachette negotiations are a perfect example. So any info from them is going to be skewed.

On the other hand, you’ve got Author Earnings, who, despite a valiant attempt at some Nate Silver-esque data crunching, hand-wave away some fairly important assumptions they make when gathering and interpreting that data, and are fairly unapologetic cheerleaders for indie author-publishing. So you’ve gotta take anything they say with a grain of salt roughly the size of Gibraltar, especially if it paints an amazingly rosy picture for indies.

To quote Ambassador Kosh on BABYLON 5: “Understanding is a three edged sword: your side, their side, and the truth.” The actual truth of the matter most likely lies somewhere between the Author’s Guild and Author Earnings’ position. The trick is to take in as much data as you can, from all of these sources, and extrapolate the likely facts from what can be gleaned from all of them.

[…] to discussing what it means to try to earn a living as a writer in the current climate. His post, Peaks and Valleys : The Financial Realities of the Writer’s Life on Terrible Minds offers plenty of food for thought for those of you wondering if it is possible […]

[…] a well-crafted response to Hurley’s post, Chuck Wendig gives some honest insights and helpful advice to combat this grim reality. Essentially, you’ve got to spread the wealth. There will be good […]

[…] would be a disaster of colossal proportions. In genreland, though, those are decent numbers, or so suggests Chuck Wendig. I confess, it’s nice to feel validated for all my dogged persistence through the years. […]